Business and Leadership

Continuing & Professional Education

Explore the use of analytical methods in management problem-solving, highlighting organizational and contextual issues. Construct an analytical model of a problem that can be manipulated or solved to identify a decision that yields the best outcome, according to one or more carefully defined criteria. The challenges of communicating and implementing results in an organizational context may also be explored through mini-cases and illustrations.

The objective of this course is to provide you with the knowledge and tools to make smart investment decisions. You will learn the principles and techniques used to analyze securities such as stocks and bonds. In addition, you will learn how to build a globally diversified portfolio. We will outline the risks to avoid and more importantly how to behave when risk manifests itself upon the markets. The focus will be on building your confidence by teaching you how to rely on a system and not on your emotions.

Strong team members are the backbone of any team, and communication is fundamental to working effectively with others. During this course, participants will learn to improve their communication and team skills. Intended outcomes include learning how to: depersonalize and disarm stress; present situations and decisions with clarity; and listen between the lines for underlying issues and concerns. This course will help participants discover how communication can help them become more effective team members.

Learn about innovative ways to budgeting and understanding forecasting techniques. Explore how the individual components of a budget cycle are connected and how your management decisions affect schedules of the budget cycle. This seminar will also introduce variance analysis concepts and techniques used to compare actual results with budget/forecasted results. Opportunities to apply the concepts learned, through a brief exercise and/or simulations may be included.

Knowing how to extract real business value from the data generated by your organization is a valuable tool for all managers. Topics may include: foundational information on what is meant by analytics; the various types of analytics - descriptive, predictive and prescriptive; moving from business intelligence to business analytics; theories and trends in data analytics; and the latest best practices and tools available in business analytics, including their advantages and disadvantages.

Business process mapping is a critical activity for creating information required to enable effective performance analysis and improvement. This course will introduce the practical skills needed to map, document, assess, and reformulate business processes. Through interactive discussion and hands-on exercises, participants may gain an understanding of process mapping applications in business process management and tools and skills for conducting business process discovery, analysis and design. Students are encouraged to utilize their own process examples for in-class exercises.

Designed for managers, business analysts, and IT leaders in corporate and government organizations who are anticipating a new system implementation, the objective of the seminar is to help participants develop an understanding of the underlying causes of "go-live" failures and work with practical ideas to ensure successful implementation.

Knowing how to initiate, lead, and manage successful change initiatives is valuable for leaders at all levels. Topics may include: change theories and models; change management strategies; initiating and implementing change; and organizational and individual learning associated with change experiences.

This course normalizes conflict. It aims to take fear and helplessness out of addressing the conflicts in your life, at home or at work. Becoming comfortable with conflict requires an understanding of what it is, the purpose it serves, how it expands and contracts, how people respond, and learning the skills and steps for resolution. We will provide a supportive, inspirational training space for you to learn and practice the foundational skills and models you need to get started.

This course is an intensive deep dive into the key communication skills effective for preventing and resolving conflicts in your personal and work life. You will have an opportunity to learn and practice skills that are time tested for clearing the air and creating understanding. This course could positively impact every relationship in your life and reduce relationship stress and miscommunication. This course will include skills in listening, questioning, disclosing, clarifying assumptions, dialoging with dignity, and speaking assertively.

This course is a journey through the world of emotional outbursts. Explore why humans are wired to avoid or attack and what triggers those responses. Gain insight on what some of your key triggers are and how to manage your own emotional response. Learn how to defuse emotional outbursts in others and way to set limits on their expression of anger.

This final course in the Art of Conflict Resolution Series will help you zero in on the theory and practice of conflict resolution to further build your knowledge, skills and confidence. The conflict resolution model will be expanded upon and skill use will be integrated into conflict resolution role-play. Prerequisite: EXCPE 5350, 5351, and 5352

Executive Presence (EP) is a combination of the way we speak, look, and behave that helps others perceive us as competent and authoritative. This highly desirable trait can be crafted and leveraged to give you greater poise and impact on your work. We will explore key traits, behaviours, and mindset needed to project a strong and authentic presence. You will be taught practical methods for cultivating these traits, including activities you can incorporate into everyday work and life.

This workshop is designed to help you learn self-management strategies in three key areas that will enhance your personal productivity: how you use your energy, what you focus on, and where you waste your time.

All supervisors, managers and other professionals are challenged with the task to review and analyze financial statements and data. In many organizations, increased focus is being placed on budgets and financial management techniques. This seminar will introduce basic financial concepts to participants whose primary role is in other functional areas. You will gain an understanding of how financial statements are prepared and how to interpret financial statements and data in order to make prudent financial decisions.

Regardless of your position, everyone plays a roles in managing risk within an organization. This course will help provide you with a theoretical understanding of what risk management is and how to use risk management for decision making in order to achieve objectives, as well as create or preserve value for your organization. Topics will include: what is risk, risk management, management and communication, and the value of learning from failure.

Improve your chances of gaining admission to the MBA program of your choice with a comprehensive course covering each area of this challenging exam: mathematics, reading comprehension, grammar, critical reasoning, and essay writing. Reinforce your skills with practice on real GMAT questions and exam simulations. Learn tips and strategies offered by our experienced GMAT instructor.

Difficult people have learned that their approaches help them get their way. It seems that this small numbers of difficult people cause most of the stress in our lives-robbing us of our productivity and satisfaction. Our usual responses only seem to make it worse. In this interactive workshop, you will learn to recognize the patterns some people use to develop the skills and responses needed to deal with these patterns more effectively and productively. Short-term tactics necessary to preserve your sanity and your priorities will be practiced, as well as long-term strategies on how to create cooperation and more productive relationships. You will develop a personal action plan to build and sustain your influence in difficult situations and in life in general.

Gain an overview of big data, the state of the practice in analytics and the analytics lifecycle as an end-to-end process. Focus on the key roles of a successful analytic project. Topics may include: the main phases of the lifecycle; and developing core deliverables to stakeholders.

Leading an organization towards a goal or an intended outcome requires a plan - and a plan to implement that plan. Topics may include: direction setting, goal setting; decision-making; problem-solving; moving from strategy to action; and project planning and delivery.

Organizations face risk from every direction. This course will focus on identifying and managing external risk and will give you an understanding about risk, risk tools, and areas of risk your organization could be exposed to. Topics covered will include: sources of external risk, such as economic, political, emergent technologies and competitors. Other topics to be discussed are corporate responsibility, what to do when there is a failure of internal and external controls, and handling crisis communication.

A well-managed change helps move an organization into the "new way" quickly, with wide-acceptance by people and minimal disruption. Examine the change process and tools and techniques to manage organizational change. Through reflection on past experience, you will examine key concepts of change and how to utilize a structured method to approach, plan and sustain a change program.

Real Change depends on people being willing to embrace the shift to a "new way." the path may not be easy. Through examination of the elements, active leaders can determine productive ways to support their teams to achieve the necessary transition to the future state.

This course is for individuals looking inside their organization to identify, manage, and prevent organizational risks while maximizing opportunities those risks my present. Topics covered will include: Organizational culture, human resources risks, crime, physical property and business continuity. At the conclusion of this course, you will have an understanding and discussion about risk, key concepts and tools and selected risk topics.

Persuasion is a core professional skill, underpinning much of our communication. In this seminar, you will learn fundamental aspects of persuasion and how to apply them to become more convincing in presentations, arguments, and conversations. Topics covered will include fundamental persuasive appeals, how to context and bias modify persuasion, critical rhetorical tools, methods for leveraging the right tool or technique at the right time, and methods of developing and defending strong arguments.

Project management has become a critical skill in every work place. Managers need to know the tools, techniques and have the knowledge to handle projects and deliver successful outcomes. Learn the basics to help you plan, execute, and control project management activities. This is an introductory project management course. We will explore successful projects and why projects that seemingly follow all the necessary rigor and methodology fail. In the end, students will leave with an enhanced ability to plan, execute and control their project management activities.

This seminar has been designed to give new and experienced project managers and project team members the essential tools they need to deliver successful projects. You will acquire the skills, tools and practices necessary, through the use of a real-life case study, for successful project communication, measuring project progress, project close out and transition to operations.

Risk management and resource planning are key elements in the successful completion of a project. The processes and activities necessary to manage risk, a detailed understanding of the increased importance of project procurement, and the core concepts, as well as tools and practices, to be employed for effective project human resource management will be studied in this two-day seminar. Using an applicable case study, the concepts learned in the classroom can be immediately applied to your real-life project.

The next step for business analytics students is to gain an opportunity to use the free software R to perform statistical computing. In this hands-on course, you will be introduced to data manipulation and visualization using the R language, primarily working with a set of packages knows as the tidyverse. At the end of this course you should be able to subset large datasets, apply functions to those subsets, fit simple linear and generalized linear models, and visualize the results in a publication-ready format.